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IPFS News Link • History

Did the Franks speak French or German?

• arclein

The shortest answer to this question is that the Franks spoke… well, Frankish, which is a Germanic language. However, Frankish and modern Standard German come from different subfamilies of Germanic languages. Frankish belongs to the West Germanic language family, while modern Standard German or High German evolved from Central and Southern German dialects. Yes, Frankish was closer to German than French but it was quite different from what you know as German today. Modern Dutch and Frankish both originated from the same language family, so Dutch is one of the closest surviving relatives of Frankish, but of course modern Dutch has changed quite a bit through the centuries.